New documentary in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids film festivals spotlights Elizabeth Catlett’s remarkable life

Director Kevin Kelley and producer Marie Wilkes of Iowa City have just one year to get their latest New Mile Media Arts documentary, “Standing Strong: Elizabeth Catlett,” on as many screens as possible, before the rights to use archival photos runs out.

So a weekend of premieres in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City will celebrate the release of this nearly hourlong look at the extraordinary life of a human rights pioneer and world-renown artist who studied under Grant Wood at the University of Iowa.

An entry in the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival, “Standing Strong” will be shown at 10:36 a.m. and 4:25 p.m. April 15 at Collins Road Theatres, 1462 Twixt Town Rd., across from Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids.

It also will be screened at 1 p.m. April 15 and 16 at FilmScene at the Chauncey, 404 E. College St., Iowa City. Discussions will follow both Iowa City showings, including a reception on April 15, the anniversary of her 1915 birth in Washington, D.C. In conjunction with the birthday celebration, Wilkes noted that more of Catlett’s work, including prints, will be taken from storage and displayed that day in the Visuals Classroom at the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art.

“I think it’s fabulous that they’re partnering with us to do such a thing,” Wilkes said.

Art & Activism

A sculptor and printmaker, Catlett came to the UI to study under Grant Wood from 1938-40, and became the first Black woman to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree from the UI, in Studio Arts. Because she was Black, she couldn’t live on campus, but in 2015, the UI opened a 12-story co-ed residence hall bearing her name.

Catlett became a pioneer in the Black Arts Movement. She also made waves with the U.S. government as a civil rights activist and moved to Mexico in 1946. She became a Mexican citizen in 1962, where she lived and worked for more than 60 years, and raised three children.

Her activism still came under scrutiny. As detailed in a biography by Melanie Herzog, she was arrested in Mexico City in the late 1950s for participating in the Union of Railroad Workers strike.

Already exploring African Americans through her art — especially focusing on marginalized Black women — she also sought to give voice to Mexico’s African ancestry through her artwork. In 1958 she became a professor of sculpture in the National School of Fine Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She became head of the department, and worked there until retiring in 1975.

Her U.S. citizenship was restored in 2002, but she lived the rest of her life in Mexico, dying there on April 2, 2012, at age 96.

Film genesis

Even with more than three decades as a documentary filmmaker under his belt, Kelley, 67, was hesitant to tackle this project, for “a number of reasons,” but credits his wife with giving him the nudge he needed.

“Marie was a good influence on me. She goes, ‘You know, this story really does need to be told, considering what's going on in the world right now.’ ”

The more he learned of the many obstacles Catlett faced in her life, he found it all “really fascinating.”

“The thing about Elizabeth Catlett that I think is important to know is that she was a pioneer in the Black Arts Movement,” he said. “Black artists for centuries were doing art, but it all looked European. (Catlett) really spoke to art for her people.”

“We’ve learned a lot,” added Wilkes, 68. “And it's about a parallel history of the people that we live with that are our neighbors, that we don’t know. We have so much more to learn, because it’s not presented to us. You have to go looking for it.

“So that was the quest there, because this whole time, we were thrilled by her artwork. But it was a daunting task for us in many ways to take this project on,” Wilkes said. “Nobody else was doing it. We looked all over and nobody was doing it.

“With a documentary, you have to do it fairly soon or it becomes more difficult. We were able to talk to people that knew of Elizabeth Catlett, and that makes a difference to the warmth of the story.

“The reason I wanted to do the story comes from me being a dancer, and being very interested in sculptures, particularly figurative,” Wilkes said. “I just remember hearing about Elizabeth Catlett, and then we were somewhere and all of a sudden, I saw this sculpture of a woman's form.

“And my heart opened up and I really identified with it, because she wasn’t draped on a couch looking over her shoulder coyly. She wasn't thrown over somebody's shoulder being carted off. This was a woman standing on her two feet, balanced, stable, and her face was lifted up. She didn't care — the sculpture did not care if someone was observing her, what they thought of her. It was a woman standing in her own skin. And I thought, ‘This is wonderful.’ ”

Wilkes hit the internet for more information, and discovered “all of her sculptures of women are like that.” She saw the same thing in Catlett’s prints, too.

“We started telling the hard truth about the difference in experiences,” Wilkes said. “It was inspirational, that this woman lived the life that she lived. Her artwork is there monumentally in cities all over the U.S. to inspire her people, and I'm lucky enough that I’ve been given that, too.”

Making the film

The couple said it seems like the film was in the works “for years,” because they had to put interviews on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. In actuality, it spanned “four years and a bit,” Wilkes said.

The process began with the research phase, which is Wilkes’ forte, although she added, “You get kind of pulled down a rabbit hole in a vacuum.”

With a multifaceted life like Catlett’s, Wilkes said the challenge becomes finding the plot points on which to focus, to make the story interesting while relating the history. For example, Kelley was fascinated by the way Wood took Catlett under his wing “to help her excel.”

The couple drove across the country to interview scholars and people who knew Catlett. Weaving together those non-scripted interviews is “a process,” Kelley said. “It's really a gamble, because it’s just people talking.”

It requires a lot of editing, to be able to jump back and forth between the people being interviewed, isolating different portions of the story each one is telling.

“It's a storyteller on camera, giving you the information — versus the narrator that you write copy for — and try to connect everything,” he said. “I'm not married to this technique. I like to have the people tell the story if possible, but there's a real limitation to that. When you use a narrator, you can go anywhere with that.

“I find it to be a lot more authentic when there's no narrator, and these people are telling story and we cut back and forth to the different interviews.”

The couple also had to find a way to get Catlett’s own voice into the film, which required Kelley to “do a lot of fancy cutting around that” to make her another voice.

He was reluctant to put a price tag on making the film, but much of the funding came from grants, including a $32,000 Greenlight grant from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs.

Next steps

The couple have been entering the documentary in independent film festivals, and it was a coincidence the film landed the same weekend in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

“I'm happy it's out there,” Kelley said. “I think people in Iowa need to know who Elizabeth Catlett is — and particularly people in Iowa City, because of the Stanley Museum” where her works are displayed.

“The thing that makes me the most happy is the response so far that we’ve gotten,” he added. “We even got put into a Swedish film festival.”

When the year is up, they’ll see if they can negotiate with the Artists Rights Society (ARS) and the Catlett estate to give the film a longer life.

“We did it as an exercise in personal reparation,” Wilkes said. “We explained that to the Catlett family — that we weren't planning to make big bucks off of their mother's art career,” Wilkes said. “We just wanted to get the word out there. I think if anything, we’ve learned that there has to be a step forward.”

“When we make films, we want to make people laugh, we want to make people cry, we want to make people think,” Kelley said. “More importantly, we want to make them act.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com

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